Newborn name statistics get recruited into racially charged political polemics

Evidence

From seemingly innocuous reporting on how the most frequent given name to newborns in certain cities or neighborhoods is now Mohammed instead of Jan (in Brussels) or Hans or Johann (in Berlin) (Bruzz, 2018; BZ, 2019) to heated and racially charged polemics, such as Austria’s first baby of 2018 derogatively being called “a newly born terrorist” (Torrens, 2018), there is a heightened public interest in the procreation of Muslim populations. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 92

Categorization

• CANDY: The ‘Mohammed instead of Jan/Hans’ detail is a compact, quotable example of how bland registry data becomes a demographic-warfare talking point.